Tag: trainwreck

A chimpanzee on Mozart

INTJ keeps digging herself deeper in her attempt to argue that Western culture is not superior by the high standards of her snowflake morality:

Hahaha. You attempted to strawman me by bringing up Hitchens. I pointed out that my type precludes me from caring what happened to Hitchens’ argument, so instead you cry “appeal to authority” where there is none.

Untrue. You didn’t point out that your type precludes you from caring what happened to Hitchen’s argument, you pointed out that your type allows you to make sure your conclusions are internally sound. You claimed that your conclusions are internally sound because you are an INTJ, but you have provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they are, in fact, internally sound. That was the logical fallacy identified. Furthermore, you cannot reasonably claim I attempted to strawman you until you show your argument about the horrific nature of Christianity and Islam is any different than Hitchens’s argument. He makes very similar claims to yours, although he is honest enough to include Judaism. It would certainly be interesting to hear your argument that Christianity requires genocide when the only examples are Judaic.

Actually, I can appeal to the highest authority there is (and the only valid authority at that): human reason. I can convince the average person that slavery, rape, and genocide are wrong under any circumstances. All you’ve got is a book written by a bunch of uncivilized tribal barbarians.

You are a very ignorant person. So, you consider reason more authoritative than science? How very medieval of you. More authoritative than history? How very stupid of you. And to claim that science and history are totally invalid authorities only shows that you are in well over your thick little head. Reason is not an authority at all, it is simply another tool. I can use it to convince the average person that slavery, rape, and genocide are moral imperatives… nor would I be the first to do so.

If the rules condone such things, fuck the rules.

Profound, very profound. As I said, your whole snowflake morality boils down to “me no likee”.

Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Personally, I bow to no one that is morally reprehensible. Not Rob Pardo, not you, and certainly not your genocidal friend.

Non serviam. That’s hardly new. To whom do you bow?

Could there possibly have been more straw in this man?

Whoosh! No wonder you don’t appreciate Western culture. It would be like asking a chimpanzee for his view on Mozart.

Snowflake morality

Some of you may find this exchange at Susan Walsh’s place to be as familiar as it is amusing. INTJ attempts to call JutR and me to account on the basis of our bigoted belief in the superiority of Western culture:

The level of arrogance and superiority you seem to have for Western culture is frankly shocking to me. I have better things to do then to have a lengthy argument about your bigoted views, but I’ll throw in a couple of points:

First, if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally, both Islam and Christianity are absolutely horrific religions. Christianity has no right to hold the moral high ground here. The only difference between the two religions is that radical Islam is far more prevalent and powerful than radical Christianity. But this has nothing to do with religion. The only reason for this is Cold War politics. It was the American government that propped up reactionary governments like the Saudis, and it’s the America and Israel that funded jihadist groups in the Middle East to destabilize pro-Soviet governments.

Second, it is clear cut that the West as a whole is far more promiscuous than the East, reflecting a cultural legacy of individualism. This culture had its pros (such as work ethic, meritocracy) and cons (promiscuity, narcissism). But there’s no question that the West is more individualist, and in America in particular, more materialist due to the consumer society.

I’ve spent time in enough third-world shitholes to vastly prefer Western culture to all of the alternatives, yes. I’m not excusing the USA’s insane meddling in empire and the West is now indubitably in decline, but if you’re going to defend cannibal cultures and pagan ones that couldn’t figure out the wheel, running water, or the rule of law, well, I’m simply going to laugh at you. Perhaps when the West collapses economically and you end up in a part of it dominated by non-Western cultures, you’ll learn to appreciate what was once Christendom.

Oh, this should be amusing. By what universal moral standard are Islam and Christianity “absolutely horrific”? Your personal and subjective one? Some pagan Indian one? If you are clueless enough to try to claim they are self-condemning by their own standards, this is going to get very embarrassing for you very fast. You would appear to be unaware that Doug Wilson absolutely handed Christopher Hitchens his head on a platter when Hitchens tried to make this very argument.

Cannibal cultures? Seriously? You should at least reread what you type before you post such shit.

You conveniently overlooked the conditionality of my statement: “if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally”. Yes, slavery, rape, and genocide are horrific according to my own moral standard. Do you disagree with this aspect of my own moral standard? If so, feel free to fuck off.

What, you didn’t hear about the German who got eaten earlier this year in Papua New Guinea? It’s not “shit”, it’s historical fact and it is still happening today. Do you really not know that albinos are being slaughtered across Africa and even in Europe now for “muti”? Or that the UN confirmed that pygmies were being eaten in the Congo in 2003?

I didn’t overlook it at all. In fact, the literal interpretation of both the Bible and the Koran is obviously assumed if one is going to judge their respective moralities by the standards imposed by the respective scriptures. And you call yourself an INTJ….

Who cares about your stupid little personal moral standard? It is no more valid to the other seven billion people on the planet than Hitler’s, Stalin’s, or anyone else’s who doesn’t subscribe to an objective one with a universal warrant. “Fuck off if you don’t agree with me” is a borderline retarded argument, but by all means, feel free to run away crying like a little girl who can’t make a rational case for her own position if you like. And you should care what that fool Hitchens did, because he was trying to defend exactly the same position you appear to be holding.

As an INTJ, I come to my own conclusions and make sure they’re internally sound. Hitchens may or may not share my conclusions, and may or may not have sound reasons for those conclusions. Either way, I don’t care, as I do not attribute much value to Hitchens’ political/philosophical activity.

And I’m not arguing with you when I tell you to fuck off. I’m simply following my own “not very valid” moral standard, which requires me to take react aggressively to those who aren’t against slavery, rape, or genocide.

You may subscribe to the moral standard as literally expounded in the scripture of the Bible, which includes Exodus 21, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20 & 21. If so, I repeat what I said earlier: feel free to fuck off.

An appeal to the authority of your personality type. That’s certainly a creative logical fallacy. Since you are the author of those conclusions, no doubt you are the ideal person to be certain your conclusions are internally sound.

How very admirable [. I suppose I must be doing the same thing, although my unique and subjective moral standard requires me to point and laugh at philosophically ignorant individuals who genuinely believe they have constructed a sound and logically consistent moral standard when they are doing little more than attempting to rationalize their feelings. Seriously, speaking as a fellow INTJ, you’re really letting the side down here. In fact, we appear to have a real conundrum here, as I can appeal to the same authority to which you are appealing in defense of a very different conclusion.

I most certainly do. God’s Games, God’s Rules. Even Socrates couldn’t quibble philosophically with that; it solves the second horn of his false dilemma. To paraphrase the voice in the whirlwind, who do you think you are, creature, to judge your Maker? You are like an NPC on a World of Warcraft server shaking its fist at Rob Pardo, demanding to know why it has to watch orc after orc after orc die at the hands of invading parties, seeing them rise again from the dead only to die in agony once more. Slaver! Murderer! Genocidal Maniac! And then Pardo flicks a switch and that entire universe vanishes in an instant.

A manifesto for economic nonsense

Read this economic manifesto, realize that it is not only written by professional economists, but signed by dozens of academics from Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, Cambridge, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, and despair for the global economy:

A Manifesto for Economic Sense

More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world’s major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.

These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.

The causes. Many policy makers insist that the crisis was caused by irresponsible public borrowing. With very few exceptions – other than Greece – this is false. Instead, the conditions for crisis were created by excessive private sector borrowing and lending, including by over-leveraged banks. The collapse of this bubble led to massive falls in output and thus in tax revenue. So the large government deficits we see today are a consequence of the crisis, not its cause.

The nature of the crisis. When real estate bubbles on both sides of the Atlantic burst, many parts of the private sector slashed spending in an attempt to pay down past debts. This was a rational response on the part of individuals, but – just like the similar response of debtors in the 1930s – it has proved collectively self-defeating, because one person’s spending is another person’s income. The result of the spending collapse has been an economic depression that has worsened the public debt.

The appropriate response. At a time when the private sector is engaged in a collective effort to spend less, public policy should act as a stabilizing force, attempting to sustain spending. At the very least we should not be making things worse by big cuts in government spending or big increases in tax rates on ordinary people. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many governments are now doing.
The big mistake. After responding well in the first, acute phase of the economic crisis, conventional policy wisdom took a wrong turn – focusing on government deficits, which are mainly the result of a crisis-induced plunge in revenue, and arguing that the public sector should attempt to reduce its debts in tandem with the private sector. As a result, instead of playing a stabilizing role, fiscal policy has ended up reinforcing and exacerbating the dampening effects of private-sector spending cuts.

In the face of a less severe shock, monetary policy could take up the slack. But with interest rates close to zero, monetary policy – while it should do all it can – cannot do the whole job. There must of course be a medium-term plan for reducing the government deficit. But if this is too front-loaded it can easily be self-defeating by aborting the recovery. A key priority now is to reduce unemployment, before it becomes endemic, making recovery and future deficit reduction even more difficult.

How do those who support present policies answer the argument we have just made? They use two quite different arguments in support of their case.

The confidence argument. Their first argument is that government deficits will raise interest rates and thus prevent recovery. By contrast, they argue, austerity will increase confidence and thus encourage recovery.

But there is no evidence at all in favour of this argument. First, despite exceptionally high deficits, interest rates today are unprecedentedly low in all major countries where there is a normally functioning central bank. This is true even in Japan where the government debt now exceeds 200% of annual GDP; and past downgrades by the rating agencies here have had no effect on Japanese interest rates. Interest rates are only high in some Euro countries, because the ECB is not allowed to act as lender of last resort to the government. Elsewhere the central bank can always, if needed, fund the deficit, leaving the bond market unaffected.

Moreover past experience includes no relevant case where budget cuts have actually generated increased economic activity. The IMF has studied 173 cases of budget cuts in individual countries and found that the consistent result is economic contraction. In the handful of cases in which fiscal consolidation was followed by growth, the main channels were a currency depreciation against a strong world market, not a current possibility. The lesson of the IMF’s study is clear – budget cuts retard recovery. And that is what is happening now – the countries with the biggest budget cuts have experienced the biggest falls in output.

For the truth is, as we can now see, that budget cuts do not inspire business confidence. Companies will only invest when they can foresee enough customers with enough income to spend. Austerity discourages investment.

So there is massive evidence against the confidence argument; all the alleged evidence in favor of the doctrine has evaporated on closer examination.

The structural argument. A second argument against expanding demand is that output is in fact constrained on the supply side – by structural imbalances. If this theory were right, however, at least some parts of our economies ought to be at full stretch, and so should some occupations. But in most countries that is just not the case. Every major sector of our economies is struggling, and every occupation has higher unemployment than usual. So the problem must be a general lack of spending and demand.

In the 1930s the same structural argument was used against proactive spending policies in the U.S. But as spending rose between 1940 and 1942, output rose by 20%. So the problem in the 1930s, as now, was a shortage of demand not of supply.

As a result of their mistaken ideas, many Western policy-makers are inflicting massive suffering on their peoples. But the ideas they espouse about how to handle recessions were rejected by nearly all economists after the disasters of the 1930s, and for the following forty years or so the West enjoyed an unparalleled period of economic stability and low unemployment. It is tragic that in recent years the old ideas have again taken root. But we can no longer accept a situation where mistaken fears of higher interest rates weigh more highly with policy-makers than the horrors of mass unemployment.

Better policies will differ between countries and need detailed debate. But they must be based on a correct analysis of the problem. We therefore urge all economists and others who agree with the broad thrust of this Manifesto to register their agreement at www.manifestoforeconomicsense.org, and to publically argue the case for a sounder approach. The whole world suffers when men and women are silent about what they know is wrong.

Now, let’s count the errors….

1. “we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s” Totally untrue… although like the interventionists of yore, these economists are attempting to blame nonexistent “liquidationists” for the problems their own policies have created. Do they seriously want to pretend that Milton Friedman and monetarism – the very Neo-Classical school whose conceptual models the Fed Chairman openly utilizes – simply never existed?

2. “the large government deficits we see today are a consequence of the crisis, not its cause.” This is partially true, but misleading. The large government deficits were a contributor to the crisis, not its cause. Both public and private borrowing are to blame, but it is true that as of 2008, in the USA, government accounted for only 14.8% of total debt outstanding. Furthermore, note that they disingenuously fail to note that federal borrowing has DOUBLED since 2008 as private debt has deleveraged.

And then there is the obvious logical blunder. If the large government deficits we see today are a consequence of the crisis, how can they possibly claim that those same governments have been cutting spending in an austerity push? From whence did those deficits come?

3. “it has proved collectively self-defeating, because one person’s spending is another person’s income” This is where we see the problem of the Neo-Classical model’s failure to account for debt. It isn’t the reduction in spending that is the problem, the problem is that the spending, and the income, was based on the false foundation of credit money manufactured out of thin air.

4. “At a time when the private sector is engaged in a collective effort to spend less, public policy should act as a stabilizing force, attempting to sustain spending.” No, attempting to paper over private “demand gaps” with public spending only exacerbates the situation. This is completely wrong and it is precisely what Bush and Obama were doing with their stimulus plans, which is why they failed.

5. “At the very least we should not be making things worse by big cuts in government spending or big increases in tax rates on ordinary people. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what many governments are now doing.” Observably incorrect. Most governments have dramatically INCREASED both their borrowing and spending. Austerity is a myth. The US government is not only running record deficits, it has DOUBLED its outstanding debt in only four years.

6. “After responding well in the first, acute phase of the economic crisis, conventional policy wisdom took a wrong turn – focusing on government deficits, which are mainly the result of a crisis-induced plunge in revenue, and arguing that the public sector should attempt to reduce its debts in tandem with the private sector.” Again, factually false. In Q1-2008, the U.S. federal government owed $5.3 trillion in debt. In Q1-2012, it owes $10.9 trillion. The US government has already been doing exactly what the manifesto demands and it clearly is not working.

7. “Every major sector of our economies is struggling, and every occupation has higher unemployment than usual. So the problem must be a general lack of spending and demand.” No, the fact that you only have a hammer does not mean that every problem you encounter must be a nail. The problem is not a general lack of spending and demand, it is a problem of excessive debt, both public and private. The Neo-Classical models have no means of either explaining the crisis or fixing it, which is why economists who utilize them keep turning to the same Keynesian and Friedmanite solutions, both of which have already failed repeatedly.

8. “In the 1930s the same structural argument was used against proactive spending policies in the U.S. But as spending rose between 1940 and 1942, output rose by 20%. So the problem in the 1930s, as now, was a shortage of demand not of supply.” Now, what happened in between 1940 and 1942? Anyone recall a certain historical event? WWII generated a massive demand for ships, planes, and tanks, which the government went into massive debt to purchase. It was paid for by the profits realized from the destruction of the industrial infrastructure of Europe and Asia.

The fools don’t realize it, but they are making an economic appeal for global war against China, Japan, and the EU.

John Scalzi still justifying sexism

And droidism. And racism. And homophobia.

In my piece on how not to be a creeper, I made a point that today I’d like to expand on just a little; I’ll explain why in a bit. Here’s the point:

2. Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeper to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creeping them out and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creep and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep” to “complete assbag.” Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.

This apparently has struck some to be dreadfully unfair, with the implication being that other people responding to folks (usually men) as creepers when in fact they’re trying to make an effort to be charming and witty and fun (or whatever) is some sort of special case in the interaction of human beings, and that such mismatches between intent and reception hardly ever happen in other situations.

To which my response is: you have got to be kidding me. Outside of the realm of possible potential creepiness, you don’t get to choose how other people respond to you, either. In any context. Indeed, regardless of your efforts to present yourself in a certain way, it is almost certain you will come across to some other people as not that way at all, and possibly the opposite of that way entirely.

On the one hand, Scalzi is absolutely right. We don’t get to choose how others feel about us or respond to us. John, for example, responds poorly to both this blog and its readers, referring to them collectively as “a feculent miasma of male self-regard”. That’s absolutely fine, it is simply his opinion, just as the idea that a woman who teaches Lesbianism in Hindu Film is convincing evidence that women are every bit as interested in the hard sciences as men is also his opinion.

You may understand if I tend to consider his opinion to be less than entirely dispositive.

So why am I objecting to what Scalzi is saying if I agree with it? Because he doesn’t actually mean it. Not only that, he doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t mean it. He is dimly aware that something is wrong, which is why he is attempting to “expand a little” on his previous point, but he still doesn’t grasp what it is. He’s appealing to a right in which he does not actually believe.

What Scalzi inadvertently did in his point two was to defend the right of free association. Which would be fine, only we know from Scalzi’s smug soft leftism that he supports absolutely nothing of the sort. Whereas he is absolutely fine with telling those condemned as “creeps” that they simply have to live with their rejection by others, I strongly suspect he is absolutely opposed to telling those condemned as “sluts” or “faggots” or “towelheads” or other behavior-based labels to do the same, much less those whose labels are purely identity-based.

And this is the point that he has resolutely evaded with his irrelevant forays into “false equivalence” and “unfairness”, even though his mention of droids indicates that he must have at least a vague idea of what he has done. Despite the fact that he has presented an argument that justifies all sorts of sexism, racism, and droidism, I don’t believe John Scalzi is actually sexist, racist, or anti-droid, he is merely a glib and inconsistent hypocrite who is willing to use an argument when it happens to suit him, then abandon it when it doesn’t. Now, I readily admit that it is possible I am wrong and Scalzi does support the right of those made uncomfortable by the presence of blacks, women, gays, or anyone else to expect those who make them uncomfortable to go away and leave them in peace, in which case I will of course retract the accusation of hypocrisy and inconsistency. I invite Mr. Scalzi to clarify his actual position on the subject.

As for the actual subject of “creepiness”, the problem is that as a gamma male, Scalzi simply doesn’t understand women or the socio-sexual hierarchy well enough to even understand what it is. As this aspect of the discussion is predominantly Game-related, I address it on Alpha Game.

John Scalzi justifies sexism

Mr. Scalzi attempts to defend female rejection of men as “creepers”, amusingly without realizing how perfectly it can be turned around and applied to male rejection of women in a manner that he would probably consider sexist:

Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeperstupid slut to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creepingpissing them outoff and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep”“stupid slut” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creepstupid slut and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep”“stupid slut” to “complete assbag”“complete bitch”. Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.”

Congratulations to John. He has managed to concoct a soundly sexist argument for simply banning women from DEFCON or any other predominantly male gathering. After all, if the dorks there don’t like women or want them near them, it’s just the way it is…. Men have precisely the same right to arbitrarily label women “stupid sluts” and treat them accordingly as women have to arbitrarily label men “creeps” and do the same.

Now, some men are genuinely creepy and I’m certainly not defending anyone’s right to behave in an uncivilized manner. But at the same time, it should be noted that women cannot be granted a right to free association that is denied to men.

UPDATE: Scalzi is either too lazy or too much of a pussy to think through his own arguments. He writes:

You know, I saw in a Google search that you wrote on this piece at your blog, and I thought to myself, “oh, great, now I go have to deal with some dumbass comment from him on the site.” And I was right! For your next trick of bad equivalence, why don’t you put the word “droid” in parentheses and congratulate me for coming up with a valid excuse for banning R2D2 from the Mos Eisley cantina?

If this is really what you’ve come to say, don’t really need to be on this thread, VD. Shoo. Everyone else, best to leave VD uncommented upon.

He also added this:

[Deleted because the point this jackhole was purporting to make was just an excuse for him to call women obnoxious things on my site. Hi there, trolls from VD’s site! Just because you wallow in a feculent miasma of male self-regard over there doesn’t mean you get to port it over here — JS]

It is fascinating to see that John Scalzi has devolved into such an intellectual pussy that he almost immediately concludes those who disagree with him must be trolls. And in support of my earlier charge of his sexism, what a sexist assumption to assume that all of the readers at VP are men! This is what happens when you run an echo chamber, you get sloppy, lazy, and eventually become unable to defend your opinions. It’s particularly embarrassing in this situation, because I am simply pointing out the obvious logical consequences of his statement, which can be easily understood by looking at the word “creep” as a variable rather than being distracted by his “false equivalence” defense.

The equivalence or lack thereof is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how Scalzi defines “creep” or to whom he applies the term. His argument works just as well for justifying the social stigmatization of “droids”, “negroes”, “homosexuals”, “girls with cooties”, or anything else that might make an individual uncomfortable. That’s not bad logic, and if he genuinely think it is, then I certainly invite him to identify the specific logical error or logical fallacy in it… if he can.

It is amusing to see him talking about “bad logic” as there is a reason I tagged this under “trainwreck” in the first place. Of course, this is the genius who once cited a female professor teaching “Lesbianism in Indian Film” at the University of Minnesota in order to defend the idea of female interest in the hard sciences.

Spanking is child abuse

But apparently chemical lobotomies are nothing more than good parenting:

The researchers found that doctor visits between 1993-1998 and 2005-2009 that involved a prescription of antipsychotic medication for children jumped sevenfold — from 0.24 to 1.83 per 100 people. For teens, 14 to 20 years old, the rate rose from 0.78 to 3.76 per 100 people, and for adults, it just about doubled, from 3.25 to 6.18 per 100 people….

Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist from Ithaca, N.Y., and an outspoken critic of widespread antipsychotic use in children, said these drugs damage developing brains

“We have a national catastrophe,” said Breggin. “This is a situation where we have ruined the brains of millions of children.” In controlling behavior, antipsychotics act on the frontal lobes of the brain — the same area of the brain targeted by a lobotomy, Breggin said. “These are lobotomizing drugs,” he added. “Of course, they will reduce all behavior, including irritability,” he said….

Between 2005 and 2009, controlling “disruptive behavior” accounted for 63 percent of the reason antipsychotics were given to children and almost 34 percent for adolescents, the researchers found.

To say nothing of what they do to long-term cognitive capacity. Between widespread chemical lobotomies and ubiquitous vaccines, I’m amazed that anyone still believes that medical “science” is genuinely focused on attempting to help children grow up to live healthy and productive lives.

It would be informative to know how these children on antipsychotics do on IQ tests before and after their brains are bathed in chemicals for years.

Send the Sikhs to safety

It seems that the Onion’s parody of Michele Bachmann’s fake response to the Wisconsin shootings wasn’t actually all that far off. Two-thirds of those killed weren’t Americans, which is why the savages are now attempting to attack the U.S. Constitution.

Top State Department officials including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been working behind the scenes to assuage Indian anger following the attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin over the weekend by an Army veteran and alleged former white supremacist.

Indian government officials and Sikh leaders across India were outraged by the attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Indian nationals, at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee and called on the U.S. to do more to protect Sikhs living in the United Sates. Clinton called Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna from her stop in South Africa Monday after Krishna criticized the U.S. for failed policies and a growing trend of violent incidents against religious minorities….

Protests broke out in several Indian cities in response to the news of the attack, some calling for stricter U.S. gun laws. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to urge the Indian government to press the Obama administration to do more to protect Sikhs living in the U.S.

First of all, the Secretary of State’s message to the Indians should be a very short and succinct one. “Fuck you, fuck your emigrants, and if they don’t like our gun rights, then they can go home to live in unarmed filth and fear among your rabid, feral dogs.”

No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them. Free-roaming dogs number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually, including vast numbers of children. An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections — more than a third of the global rabies toll.

If the Indians were willing to fight for their own freedom to carry guns, they could save tens of thousand of lives by simply shooting the feral dogs that attack them. But they’d rather run their mouths trying to interfere with how Americans live in the USA than do anything about the squalor, filth, and tyranny of their own country. The Obama administration should agree to protect the Sikhs by putting them on a plane back to India.

It’s a mystery!

Massachusetts can’t figure out why its health care costs are growing:

Give Massachusetts credit for setting audacious health care goals. It took the lead in guaranteeing near-universal health insurance coverage for its residents, providing a template for the federal reforms to follow…. But when it comes to controlling health care costs, Massachusetts has no advantage, and in fact is starting behind most other states. Its costs are among the highest in the nation, and they have been growing in recent years at 6 percent to 7 percent while the economy has been growing at less than 4 percent.

The amusing thing about America’s left-liberals is that they are so “thoughtful” and “nuanced” and “complex” that they can’t see blatant causation when it is right in front of them. These are the sort of people who stare at a light, wonder what is meant by the red color, and then conclude that it must mean they are supposed to drive ahead. The subsequent car accident, of course, is nothing more than sheer happenstance and bad fortune.

Can you imagine if these jokers tried to run a restaurant?

“Bill, I’m confused. We’re serving more people, but for some inexplicable reason, we suddenly don’t seem to have enough food anymore.”

Gary North still hates Americans

Gary North is apparently foolish enough to continue shopping around that inept and deceptive article wherein he blatantly lies about the opponents of free trade and the arguments and critiques they present. Previously on Lew Rockwell, the same article is now featured by the Mises Institute:

I have found over the years that when I debate with people who promote tariffs, meaning sales taxes on imported goods that are enforced by people with badges and guns, they always adopt arguments that apply only to America’s side of the border. They refuse to adopt those very same arguments for people on the other side of the border.

I challenge defenders of tariffs to state their arguments in terms of both of the people who want to trade, not just the American. The ethics and economics of restricted trade surely apply to the person who wants to trade on the other side of the invisible line known as a national border. If the arguments for restricted trade apply to the American economy, then surely they apply to the other nation’s economy. Logic and ethics do not change just because we cross an invisible judicial line. I take this position because I want the pro-tariff person to face the implications of his position.

Of course, Mr. North doesn’t hold himself accountable to the same standard as he flees from the obvious and inescapable conclusions that are logically dictated by his dogmatic free trade positions. Despite his challenge, I can almost guarantee he won’t address this argument for restricted trade, which transcends economics and applies to Americans, Frenchmen, and Chinese alike. Consider:

1. Free trade, in its true, complete, and intellectually coherent form, is not limited to the free movement of goods, but includes the free movement of capital and labor as well. (Note, for example, that the “invisible judicial line” doesn’t magically become visible when because human bodies are involved.)

2. The difference between domestic economies and the global international economy is not trivial, but is substantive, material, and based on significant genetic, cultural, traditional, and legal differences between various self-identified peoples.

3. Free trade is totally incompatible with national sovereignty, democracy, and self-determination, as well as the existence of independent nation-states with the right and ability to set their own laws according to the preferences of their residents.

4. Therefore, free trade must be opposed by every sovereign, democratic, or self-determined people, be they American, Chinese, German, or Zambian, who wish to preserve themselves as a free and distinct nation possessed of its own culture, traditions, and laws.

I invite Gary North or any other advocate of free trade to dispute or attempt to correct that argument. Now let’s consider the facts. Free trade advocates often claim that there is no reason for any difference between the U.S. domestic economy and the international economy. They believe there should be no more barriers between sovereign nation-states than there are between the several and united American States. And yet, look at the difference between labor mobility in the USA versus the European Union.

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year,

These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States. In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”
– Peter Ester and Hubert Krieger, “Comparing labour mobility in Europe and the US: facts and pitfalls”, 2008

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

US overall 50.5 percent
East 54.3 percent
Midwest 65.0 percent
South 47.3 percent
West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full beneficial extent of the concept.

To paraphrase North, if you still refuse to give up the idea of free trade as a desirable means to increase the wealth of nations, then you should at least admit to yourself and others that you favor the total destruction of national sovereignty, the elimination of the U.S. Constitution, and the end of America and other historical nations. It’s time to come clean. You favor the politics of ein Welt, ein Recht, ein Volk.

In much the same way that those who support high tax levels cannot understand the counter-intuitive fact that the higher tax rates do not always lead to higher tax revenues, free trade advocates fail to understand that reducing national trade barriers will not always lead to increased wealth or liberty. If one believes that America was ever any sort of paragon of wealth and freedom, then it is obviously insane to advocate any policy that will cause America to return to the global average with regards to either, even if that policy would tend to raise the global average to some degree.

A crisis wasted

The Obama administration needn’t have gone to all that trouble to shoot up that Denver theater:

The weeks-long conference at the United Nations to produce an Arms Trade Treaty is ending without the creation of a treaty. None of the draft treaties which have circulated in the past several days came remotely close to finding consensus support. The impossibility of achieving consensus involved a wide variety of issues and nations, far beyond the Second Amendment concerns that have been raised by many American citizens.

What an embarrassment! To go to all that trouble and get nothing out of it but a few million more concealed carry permit holders. Don’t those troublesome member states and NGOs realize that the White House can’t override the Second Amendment without a solid international treaty to use as an excuse?